The Big Store

MODERN TIMES continued.

Moments ago they were out fantasising in the suburban sprawl, now Charlie and the Gamin are suddenly at the entrance to a department store, and there’s a vacancy. The night watchman has broken his leg. I wonder how? But Charlie doesn’t. Presenting the letter from the prison governor, he is immediately hired. Hmm, I wonder how often that happened in real life.

He immediately sneaks the Gamin in — after all, they are not only unemployed but homeless. Department stores make excellent homes, as you’ll know if you’ve seen either Evening Primrose or DAWN OF THE DEAD. Charlie has hit on the perfect way to get fired within 24hrs, thus giving the film finally a structure — the running gag of job loss.

The store has a huge bar with cakes and sandwiches standing uncovered. Safe to eat? Apparently.

Invading the toy department, as you would, the Gamin is drawn to an off-model Mickey Mouse (in his only costarring role with Chaplin, so far as I’m aware, though CC may appear in a Disney toon somewhere), but then they both don rollerskates for a spin around the shop floor. We may be about to learn how the night watchman injured himself.

Like some Krell laboratory, the store has a three-storey drop without guardrail, and Chaplin teases us with some Harold Lloyd thrill-comedy, using a glass painting to avoid running the risk of actual death. The main pleasure of the sequence is the return to THE RINK, showcasing CC’s balletic grace.

The G., noticing that blindfolded Charlie is skating close to the edge of extinction, claps her hand over her mouth to stifle a scream, probably NOT the right instinctive response. Losing the power of speech (well, it IS a sort-of silent film) she has to wobble towards him (she wasn’t in THE RINK so she’s a novice on wheels) and nearly propel him over the edge with her. Brilliant.

Chaplin claimed he learned counterpoint from the English music hall — Fred Karno would use elegant chamber music to accompany drunken tramps. And that’s it: the graceful music fits Chaplin’s moves, but ignores the panic and peril the Gamin and the audience are feeling. Thereby intensifying them, while maintaining a comic distance.

Good gag where, finally seeing the danger, Chaplin loses all control of his legs and begins frantically, compulsively moonwalking to his doom. It’s always the way.

And then the pair gingerly tiptoe away. They will not be doing THAT again. Note to self: never rollerskate blindfold in a deserted toy department without checking for the YAWNING ABYSS.

What becomes a legend most? Paulette luxuraites in a fur coat before bedding down for the night in the bedding department.

Thieves! With a gun pointed at him, Charlie again loses the power of rollerskating. Commanded to freeze, he instead puts on a furious display of running forwards while moving backwards. On a trajectory that takes him to the escalator (THE RINK meets THE FLOORWALKER). Again, a Chaplin motif that seems to stem from childhood anxiety — under the orders of a strict authority figure, Charlie is physically unable to comply. See also Black Larsen ordering him out of the cabin in THE GOLD RUSH, while the wind compels him to remain.

Charlie is now forcibly inebriated by a perforated rum keg. First cocaine, now rum. The wildest time since Stan Laurel in FRA DIAVOLO. It turns out that one of the burglars is “Big Bill” from the Electro Steelworks — Stanley J. “Tiny” Sandford. He never liked Charlie when they were so-workers, but now he’s an unemployed criminal he’s overcome with nostalgic affection. The good old days of dehumanizing slave labour, One of his partners in crime cracks open a bottle of champers and they all get swallied together.

Next morning, the Gamin awakens before the store opens — Chaplin is ruthless about not giving Paulette any comedy to do — and Charlie is discovered amid the women’s apparel, rising arse-up like a sudden trousered volcano.

Result: Charlie is fired AND arrested — we never learn what happened to Tiny’s gang but I hope they made off with enough valuables to make them comfortable for life.

Off to prison! To be continued.

Why Does Herr X Run Amok?

Interesting that Charlie’s journey into the big machine should become MODERN TIMES’ defining image. Lifting it out of the narrative makes it a beautiful man versus machine pic — Chaplin as organic spanner in the works. The fact that he’s daintily servicing the mechanism doesn’t matter — we can tell he DOESN’T BELONG THERE. The incongruity makes it a funny image, but rather epic at the same time. I remember being a touch disappointed the sequence doesn’t go on longer, with Charlie drawn deeper and deeper into the great clockwork innards.

Charlie getting swallowed by the machine — MOLOCH! — is further evidence that Chaplin is responding to the rich comic potential of Lang & Harbou’s METROPOLIS.

What makes the shot a surprising choice for posterdom is that Charlie is out of character — his mind has gone. The only time this happened to him, though two of his forthcoming characters, Hynkel and Verdoux, might be insane. Chaplin had regarded his mother Hannah’s mental illness as “an escape” from her intolerable poverty, and Charlie’s very temporary madness is certainly that — an eruption of LIBERTY, a throwing off of the shackles of industry, a bout of ludicrous bad behaviour whose hidden purpose — getting him sacked — is achieved just as neatly as if it had been consciously planned.

When he snaps, Charlie becomes, as I keep saying, an intense version of his Keystone self — a nasty, balletic, smutty imp who abuses his co-workers. It’s notable all along that Charlie and Chaplin are equally incapable of solidarity. Even before his breakdown, Charlie is a pain in the ass to work with. And while it’s gratifying to see him oil-can his boss, he squirts big Tiny Sandford a lot more.

Oh yes, the oil can. An unsavoury Freudian metaphor could be devised to explain its origins and purpose here. And we are indeed in that terrain, since the nut-like buttons on the sexy secretary’s skirt, and on the jacket of a big dignified woman, attract attention from the spanner-wielding maniac which is not quite sexual, but sex-adjacent. Indeed, Charlie’s losing interest in female prey when he spots a fire hydrant is a very funny, vaguely dirty moment in itself, since getting excited at fire hydrants is canine toilet behaviour. All through this, Chaplin is a biomechanical Harpo Marx, a demonic chaser of skirts and assaulter of authority, and like with Harpo, his real obsessions aren’t even human.

Although, hanging from the ceiling with the can held like a rapier, Charlie momentarily mutates into his United Artists co-founder and chum, Doug Fairbanks. Though the famous grin is more satanic.

Even in his demented state, Charlie is somehow able to recognise the threat inherent in a kop’s authority, which always struck me as an interesting demarcation line. Crazy, but not THAT crazy. Likewise, he punches in when re-entering the factory, but the gesture has lost all meaning, is sheer mechanical perseveration, the bureaucratic urge gone Pavlovian.

Matt Groening has said that Homer is the most interesting Simpson because his mistakes have the biggest consequences — he could theoretically destroy Springfield. And now the antic Charlie madman sets about potentially blowing up his despised workplace. We would love to see it happen, antisocial as it seems. Go full Nakatomi Plaza. Stephen de Souza upset the producers of DIE HARD by telling them that, despite the added cost, he was going to write that the building gets blown up — because the audience would hate that building by the film’s conclusion. Just as it had been necessary to blow up the BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI.

Well, Chaplin doesn’t quite go that fire — he can have more fun with this factory later, and the Charlie character, a natural unconscious anarchist, never manages to actually overthrow anything. Fun watching him try though.

A shame Chaplin couldn’t or wouldn’t visualise his “cure” in this film, which adds to the sense of disconnected picaresque (which I’ve never had the slightest problem with — it actually seems like the most appropriate narrative form the Tramp character can inhabit). Later, when Charlie goes to jail, that WILL be depicted, unlike in CITY LIGHTS. So I’m assuming Chaplin didn’t want to go there, felt that seeing the character slowly emerge from madness wouldn’t be funny, whereas plunging into it with wholehearted glee clearly WAS.

Comedy Star

THE CIRCUS continues. More evidence of the nasty ringmaster mistreating his daughter — he’s starving her. Presumably concerned that she needs to remain slim for the trapeze. This circus is a lot like a movie studio, only he’s not giving her speed a la Judy Garland.

A star is discovered — Chaplin, asleep in the chariot/cart — the seed has been planted — the audience called for him. The ringmaster knows he’s a meal ticket. It IS a bit like Chaplin’s own story, how he was on the verge of getting canned from Keystone for being so difficult, until the box office receipts came in from his first films. The audience had spoken. Mack Sennett does not seem to have been as mean as Al Ernest Garcia is here, though.

Garcia is one of those effective but colourless supporting characters Chaplin liked. He didn’t want the attention on anyone but himself, but the actors around him needed to be very skilled indeed. Garcia plays the drunken millionaire’s butler in CITY LIGHTS and the factory boss in MODERN TIMES, and I’d never put one and one and one together before and realised it’s the same guy.

I recognise Tiny Sandford, the head props man, though — he’s Charlie’s co-worker in MODERN TIMES.

Making breakfast the next morning — there’s a good chicken-strangling gag — and Charlie has a waistcoat pocket full of salt for his meagre repast, rather the way Harpo might. Charlie is very fastidious about food, as we saw earlier with the hot dog. This is all a set-up for the meet cute, for the girl is hungry. Charlie is at first furious when he finds her eating his single slice of bread. A thief — a rival thief — must be fought off. But a girl is another matter. He ends up sharing the bread, and then she eats it so fast she gives him indigestion. Production designer Danny Hall’s painting of a sword swallower doesn’t help him.

Immediately, Charlie is behaving like a father, a benign one to contrast with the nasty real one. It’s his first time in this role since THE KID, the first time his romantic interest has been acknowledged as rather young for him, the relationship ambiguous. A few films later we have MONSIEUR VERDOUX and LIMELIGHT, which take this further — the relationship is played as platonic and paternal. The Paulette Goddard films are slightly more romantic — maybe because they were a couple and it felt safer. It feels to me like Chaplin, unlike Woody Allen for decades, was becoming aware that audiences didn’t want to see him wooing and winning much younger women. Chaplin was rather handsome, but his Tramp guise negated some of that. And his scandalous divorce made any intimation of sexual desire dangerous.

So, anyway, Charlie has met the girl. Now he has to audition as a clown. Told to be funny, he does some Chaplinesque things. A backwards kick, a funny walk, hoisting himself up with his cane. “That’s awful!” says the ringmaster. Now we get a longish sequence where clowns demonstrate routines and Charlie tries to copy their schtick. This seems to be the stuff Walter Kerr objected to so strongly in The Silent Clowns.

For me, the problem is that none of it is particularly funny. The clown routines, performed by regulars Henry Bergman and Albert Austin with Heinie Conklin (a prospector in THE GOLD RUSH, and a specialist in racist caricatures), aren’t terribly interesting, though Charlie laughs and claps to try to convince us. His screwing them up isn’t interesting either. There’s a conflict of response, a confusion — is Charlie destroying the comedy, resulting in something unfunny, or is he destroying bad comedy, resulting in something that IS funny? Maybe the latter is the intention, but it’s not clear to me.

It SHOULD work, since Charlie is working in a mode he knew well — the incompetent and rascally assistant. In the William Tell routine, that’s also the role he’s actually asked to play. It’s the Auguste (Chaplin) and the whiteface clown (Bergman). Arrogant leader and minion who messes up. Workman and boss. Laurel & Hardy. Chaplin had been doing this since Keystone (WORK; HIS MUSICAL CAREER). But making the task performed a comedy routine seems to overcomplicate it.

The William Tell routine is something Chaplin had played with when Scottish comic Harry Lauder had visited his studio. There’s a piece of film. Here, Charlie elaborates it by substituting a banana skin for the apple, making a surreal mash-up of different slapstick ingredients, but it lands in that strange are of is-this-supposed-to-be-funny? It’s not clear that Charlie’s improvisation is worse than the original act.

Then there’s the barbershop act, which gets done very differently in THE GREAT DICTATOR, and had been done differently in SUNNYSIDE, but deleted. This one’s all buckets of foam getting slapped over everyone. There might have been a convincing conflict between a routine that’s all meaningless capering, and one based on character. This had been the actual conflict Chaplin faced and overcame at Keystone. But it won’t do here, I guess, because the Tramp character is not a comedian or a comic genius.

This is the trouble with comic plot ideas — they have to be serviceable story engines that move things along and lead to a climax — but they also have to create opportunities for amusing things to happen. Charlie’s inability to be funny on cue fulfils the former but not the latter, or at least, not in this scene.

Anyway, Charlie gets fired, not so much for failure to do the required gags, but for getting foam all over the boss, which we recognise as a real no-no. Chaplin now needs to find a narrative excuse to keep Charlie at the circus, and fortunately he’s really good at coming up with solutions. Here he relies on an old favourite (see, for instance, DOUGH AND DYNAMITE): an industrial dispute. The props men go on strike. A replacement must be found. Charlie is using an unconscious prop man as human furniture when Tiny Sandford finds him. He’s discovered again, hired again, the show’s on again.

TO BE CONTINUED